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Typically you have those applications you like and those applications you love to use but every now and then an application comes around that completely changes the way you work and those become the applications you can’t live without. For me, that application is Quicksilver from Blacktree on my OSX machine. Not sure exactly how to discribe what exactly Quicksilver is, to say its just an “application launcher” would be seriously underminding everything Quicksilver brings to the table.

It took me sometime to get my mind around what Quicksilver was and what it could do. I am probably a yellow belt when it comes to using Quicksilver, I am well beyond using the basic features but still haven’t really scratched the surface of what it can do to really master it. I use a similar application for Linux called Gnome Do and one for my Windows boxes called Launchy but neither of them have the integration and do for me what Quicksilver does. Even the Apple OS X built in Spotlight falls far short in my opinion.

Quicksilver can be a tough application to understand and I personally hadn’t come across a lot of good instructions on how to use it. Been doing the whole trial by fire approach. But fortunately one of my buddies over at Splunk has put together one of the best Quicksilver tutorials I’ve seen to date. Check out Michael Wilde’s Blog entry on “Mac Productivity with Quicksilver”

Sometimes it’s the simple things that amaze people and leave them thinking you are some type of computer genius. My daughters have grown up with computers, and I mean hardcore. Their first computer was a SUSE Linux machine; they’ve worked on Windows and OS X boxes and they know their way around them all. At 10 years old, they’ve taken over the IT tech support duties for my wife. Next, I am going to install a phone line in their room so other family members can call them when they need help. What I am trying to say is, their Dad’s vast knowledge of computers doesn’t impress them. Whenever I think I’m showing them something new and cool on the computer, they have an attitude of “huh, I just didn’t know how to do it, now I do and its not that cool”.

I myself get kind of like that too, I am pretty hardcore geek and bells and whistles on computers don’t really impress me. I typically look at things on a much deeper level. That’s why when I read an article sometime back called “Having fun with the SAY command in your Terminal” I thought to myself, “Cute” and filed it away in the back of my mind thinking I will never have a use for that command.

The SAY command on OS X is a Speech Synthesis Manager. If you own an OS X machine, open a terminal window and type “man say” (minus the quotes) for more information, or just type “say Hello. do you want to play a game” and start having fun with it.

One day, one of my daughters and I were having somewhat of a disagreement on if it was more important for her to clean her room or finish watching TV; guess which side I was on. As privileges started to get stripped away, right after “no more pool time” but before “no more Playstation3 time”, she stomps off into her room. Knowing she wasn’t in her room doing what was asked of her, and knowing I was probably too mad myself to try to talk to her, I sat at my laptop tapping the space bar. Then it dawned on me; I fired up a terminal session on my Ubuntu laptop and made a ssh connection to my daughter’s computer in her room and proceeded to test out that SAY command. It went something like this;

say Why are you so mad

I hear a deep synthetic voice mumble come from behind my daughters’ door followed by a somewhat confused sounding voice of a little girl.

say Didnt your dad ask you to clean your room? I like a clean room

Some more little girl mumbles. Is she arguing with the computer now?

say Your dad is probably the smartest man I know, and may be the smartest man on earth, you should listen to him

OK, that last one might have been too much and may have tipped her off. I hear her door open and she yells, “I don’t know how you are doing that but you better show me”

Anyways, SSH with SAY and you can have all sorts of fun with co-workers, family, and friends. Further more they will think you are truly 1337.

Every now and then I just post things I don’t want to forget or worried that the original website might disappear. This is one of the cases. This is a blog posting I came across on a little problem that plaques those of us that enjoy using OS X but have a need to move files to other systems like Linux and Windows.

There is a dirty little secret the Mac hides from you when you are using it but becomes a glaring eyesore when you move to another OS. Some file clean up needs to happen because OSX creates these hidden files that start with a ._ which contains some extended information about the file that no other system reads so they aren’t terrible useful when moving files to these systems. This post from a person working for Splunk, outlines how to tar up files on a OSX machine that is targeted for other systems and exclude the ._ files from the tarring process. Original article can be found here

————— POST ———————-

When building Splunk applications, I’m often working on a Mac. There
are files that begin with ._ that are resource files, which contain
extended attribute information about the files for the OS. This is
great and all but I don’t want to include these files when I package up
an application and upload it to SplunkBase.

If you don’t have deep OSX knowledge, then keeping these files out
of your tarball is harder than it looks. One of our OSX gurus pointed
me toward the answer, and I was so excited (yes, I am a geek) that I
just had to share.

To build a tarball in Leopard that doesn’t contain the ._ files, use:

COPYFILE_DISABLE=true tar cvzf filename.tar.gz dirtotar

In Tiger, use:

COPY_EXTENDED_ATTRIBUTES_DISABLE=true tar czvf filename.tar.gz dirtotar

This is definitely going in my .bashrc so I don’t have to fuss with it again:

export COPYFILE_DISABLE=true

————— PEND OF POST ———————-

OK, I am by no means an expert with OSX, especially the new Leopard. I also know there have been a lot of new features added with this latest release of OSX so I could have very easily missed this one but when I stumbled onto it I thought it was really pretty cool.

If you select a file and hit the space bar you get a nice preview of the file.

If you do this while you have a folder selected you get some good information on the folder such has folder size.

And just as an FYI, you don’t even need to be in Finder to do this trick. You can do it directly on the Desktop. Just select something and hit the space bar.

Just one of many cool features I didn’t realize lived within Leopard.

Update: Finally found the name to this feature, Quick Look